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Mozilla Jumps On IoT Bandwagon (thestack.com)
mikejuk writes: Mozilla has been clarifying some of its plans to convert the Firefox OS project into four IoT based projects. At a casual glance, this seems like a naive move that is doomed to failure. Project Link is a 'user agent' for the smart home, that helps the end user set preferences for device interaction, and automates those connections for the user in a secure environment. Next, Project Sensor Web will be a pilot project for crowdsourcing a pm2.5 sensor network. Project Smart Home is focused on bridging the gap in IoT smart home providers between completely boxed solutions like Apple HomeKit, and completely DIY solutions like Raspberry Pi. Finally, Project Vaani is a voice interface for IoT access, which Mozilla credits as the 'most natural way to interact with connected devices.' With Firefox losing market share and projects like Firefox OS, Thunderbird, Shumway, and Persona closing down, perhaps Mozilla should try and find its way back to core concerns. All four of the projects need significant AI expertise and a powerful cloud computing resource neither of which Mozilla is likely to be able to afford.
But IOT!
I guess jumping on the "Look at ME! I'M JUST LIKE CHROME!!!" bandwagon didn't work out too well....
what are people in charge of mozilla thinking ? or can they even think ?
they are ultra concerned with everything other than their core project, which has suffered and is losing.
it is not just related peripherals, but what amounts completely different things which should be handled as completely separate projects with groups and resources set up for them, if there is a need.
nor is that all, mozilla is way too much concerned with pandering to market hype (hype not market reality as represented by numbers) and spout out the latest buzz words and social ideology of the western 'liberal' elite.
shame!
And the biggest loons are the UI twerps.
because all there other venture in other things have gone heaps well just focus on the web browser. you are not Google, Microsoft or Apple with huge wads of cash you make a browser and we need you to continue to make this browser to keep everyone honest
What has Mozilla been doing lately other than focusing on their "core concerns" (whatever you feel those are)? Have you not heard about the Great or Dead thing, or do you think that shutting down all of those projects was their way of NOT focusing their efforts? Why does them wanting to see if Firefox OS can be made useful for IoT suddenly negate all of that? Do you think they're going to pull a lot of their core devs onto this project? I'm honestly pretty stumped here. It almost sounds like you want to paint them in a negative light no matter what illogic is necessary to get you there. What should they do instead? Sit back and let Google or Apple or Microsoft take over that market segment, and not let them effectively compete there too?
My thermostat using my 2TB NAS as swap space after running for 3 days.
It's no secret that Firefox is seriously losing market share. Firefox is likely under 8% of the browser market now, across all desktop and mobile platforms! To put that number into perspective, note that desktop Chrome 48 alone has over 3 times the number of users that Firefox has in total, and Chrome for Android 47 has over 2 times that number. IE 11, iOS Safari 9.2, and UC Browser for Android each have about the same number of users as Firefox does. Firefox nearly has fewer users than even Opera Mini has! And Firefox has essentially no mobile presence at all. Firefox for Android is only at 0.04%!
Despite being one of the most popular browsers several years ago, I think that Mozilla has gone out of their way to alienate Firefox users as often as they can. They've trashed Firefox's UI, turning it into an awful clone of Chrome. They've injected unwanted shit like Pocket and Hello into Firefox by default. They even put ads into the browser itself, although rumor has it they finally realized how fucking idiotic this was and are removing them. They've removed useful options from the preferences window. And despite making all of these changes that users don't want, they never seem to get around to fixing the longstanding memory and performance issues that have plagued Firefox for years.
The mandatory extension signing bullshit they've got in the works, along with changing to Chrome's extension model at some point, will utterly destroy Firefox's usability I think. The inconvenience these changes will bring to Firefox's few remaining users and extension developers will likely be enough to push them away completely. Firefox's 8% of the browser market will likely drop to the low single digits far quicker than anyone will have imagined.
To make matters worse, Mozilla has wasted a huge amount of time and effort on the Rust programming language and the Servo browser engine. In my view, Rust is a totally failed attempt to replace C++ with a "safer" language. I think that all they've managed to create is a language with an ugly syntax (even by C++'s standards!), an impractical ownership system, a single slow implementation (which itself is quite buggy despite being written in Rust, a language that's supposed to avoid this!), a rather awful standard library, and a questionable community that's highly focused on codes of conduct and censorship in the name of "tolerance" and "diversity".
Servo, which is written in Rust, is abysmal in my experience. I tried it last week, and I think I'd get better results using IE 3 today. Hell, Servo wouldn't even render any page for me for more than a minute before it crashed! Despite all of the hype around it, it fails to deliver even a 1990s browser experience.
In my opinion, things are looking extraordinarily bleak for Mozilla. They've ruined Firefox for so many users already. The replacement is going absolutely nowhere. And now it appears that they're going to make the Firefox experience even worse for the few users who remain! It's unbelievably sad what's happening to Firefox and Mozilla. Please, Mozilla, don't do this! Don't make yourself irrelevant! Please! For the sake of the web, please!
another additional turd for the internet of shit.
This is the worst kind of open source flaw. Developers are going to scratch their itch...and what they want has nothing to do with what users want. It's a damn shame to see things end up this way. They're just chasing the latest trend, late to the game as usual, and will end up making a terrible mess of things.
However the resumes of the people involved will be enhanced, and that's what it's all about. Sadly.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
We don't want to have to be negative about Mozilla. We love the concept of Mozilla. We love what Mozilla once was, years ago. We loved them when they produced the best web browser around. But then they went and threw it all away.
They turned Firefox into a really shitty imitation of Chrome. Each new release somehow manages to be worse than the last.
They pretty much gave up on Thunderbird.
They've failed with one stupid idea after another. I mean, Firefox OS?! Really?! How the fuck did they ever hope to succeed with a slow, shitty mobile OS that was more primitive than even the initial versions of Android and iOS were, years before?!
Servo is going nowhere. Seriously, try it out if you haven't already. It's nowhere near usable.
Rust is pathetic. It has the worst programming language community I've ever experienced. They have a goddamn moderation team, for crying out loud! No other programming language community has its own Staatssicherheit like Rust has.
Then there's all the social justice nonsense. Their former CEO lost his job merely because of his views about marriage, for crying out loud! Nobody should lose their job over something like that, especially when it comes to an organization that's supposedly so about "openness" and "tolerance" and "diversity".
We want the old Mozilla back. We want the pre-hipster Mozilla back. We want the Mozilla that produced a highly usable and very extensible web browser that worked well for beginners and power users alike. We want the Mozilla that produced one of the better email clients. We want the Mozilla that made us happy with each new release of their software. We want the real Mozilla back!
Anyone know of a good cross platform replacement for Thunderbird that has a caldav calendar too? Fuck you very much Mozilla for killing Thunderbird.
So they have to get rid of (good) stuff like Thunderbird, because they need better focus (or whatever the lame ass excuse was) on things like FF, and now they do this?
No one wants Mozilla to write software that goes on the web, there's no need for that. They should stick to what they're best at.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Those jerks keep telling me the shit I don't wann to hear. You guys really must hate peace of mind.
fancies itself as informed tech geeks/nerds
That horse long left the barn
Mozilla is yet another victim of the so-called "social justice" ideology.
Contrary to its name, this ideology is not "social" in nature, nor does it include "justice".
There's nothing "social" about forcing highly subjective and even hypocritical codes of conduct on community members.
And it's not "justice" when an executive and long-time contributor loses his job just because of his views on marriage.
If you think I'm joking, just read the Rust code of conduct for yourself.
It says:
Yet just a few lines down from that it very hypocritically states:
It's hypocritical and contradictory of them to state that they want to provide "a friendly, safe and welcoming environment for all", yet they turn around and almost right away use a very unfriendly and unwelcoming threat like "We will exclude you from interaction".
The moderation policy even states that anyone could be "indefinitely excluded". That's also not not creating a "welcoming environment for all"!
To make matters worse, this punishment can be doled out arbitrarily by the moderators:
And to make matters even worse than they already are, there's not even a way to publicly appeal the punishment! The moderation policy states:
It's a total lack of justice, as far as I'm concerned. Arbitrary judgment, arbitrary enforcement, arbitrary punishment, and no public appeal process all reek of injustice.
I'm continually amazed at how self-contradictory and self-defeating the Rust code of conduct is. It essentially states that they will engage in the very behavior they're saying not to engage in!
I'm a moderately intelligent person by some objective standards, but have a difficult time thinking of any iot, ie. hardware, project that can't, almost trivially, be accomplished with Processing.
The internet of this will be run by cheap micros like the esp8266. WiFi, 32 bit CPU and more for less than 2$ a piece.
First time posting as AC, but seriously. How stupid are the people at Mozilla? The only reason that organization became anything at all is because of Firefox. So why are they doing nothing to improve it? I don't care about Firefox OS or whatever ridiculous project of the month they're doing. Focus on making a better browser.
Those Pale Moon guys seem to be doing a good job. Maybe Mozilla should just adopt that but not be involved with the exception of financial support.
I wish they'd do something about the fact that Firefox on PC starts timing out on me when it reaches about 1GB of RAM. Besides the fact that I do 90% of my browsing on a desktop, performance problems on a high-end machine don't inspire confidence that it'll fare well on a Raspberry Pi.
What?
1] An standardised app interface
2] Data monitoring, logging and possibly analysis
3] Software converters / adapters to assist people who want to customise their home network with products from various vendors.
4] Voice recognition to create simple, limited commands to a set of devices.
Seriously? There's a slim chance that AI may benefit products in categories 2 and 4 but it's not "required" or even "expected". Crap submission
SJW's need a new project to infect.
Just add one 'i' there and you've got vaanii, as in "stalks." It's clearly something to do with IoT. ;)
Mozilla has nobody it seems capable of making good business decisions anymore. A poorly made one with Yahoo was certainly at the top, and then Mozilla seems insistent on going on these no win tangents rather then focusing on saving Firefox.
FirefoxOS into IoT?
Seriously?
Hate to tell these 'tards...they got to the party waaay late. Seems someone took their competitor's better JS engine for this task and implemented...Node.js.
Idiots.
It's their only really unique product. And it's darned useful.
Jedis are stupid. If they were so powerful, why couldn't they handle counseling for a kid who missed his mom?
Or a Thunderbird local server unified messaging platform using Firefox as the client (my proposal): http://pdfernhout.net/thunderb...
Mozilla rejected my application to do that project the very next day after I sent it. The rejected a related proposal by me a couple years earlier to improve Thunderbird desktop. From an earlier poster who works at Mozilla, I now understand that situation better. I had not realized how dysfunctional the organization had become.
That Thunderbird server project is currently on hiatus as I just started a new job, but I still hope I can do some bits and pieces of that idea of a FOSS messaging platform now and then that might someday add up to it.
Meanwhile, a proprietary Slack is eating the free/standard messaging sphere: http://pdfernhout.net/reasons-...
One year of Mozilla's revenues is about the same as all the VC money that has gone into Slack. Meanwhile the Mozilla CEO says essentially that FOSS messaging tools like Thunderbird do not matter any more and kisses off Thunderbird. To my mind, at this point, Thunderbird is the more viable concept compared to Firefox (let alone any of the other ill-considered projects) -- as the success of Slack shows.
I can be thankful for Mattermost and Matrix.org as free Slack alternatives.
http://www.mattermost.org/
http://matrix.org/
But imagine what such FOSS messaging software could be like with hundreds of millions of dollars a year behind it to fund a team of thousands of full-time developers.
Bottom line: Mozilla is pissing away hundreds of millions of dollars a year of money (and thousands of developer years) that should be earmarked for essential FOSS (like communications tools) on projects with near zero chance of success(a new mobile OS?) or that are unneeded (yet another programming language?) -- while paying huge executive salaries.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
After hearing about that alleged Wikipedia scam, using non profit resources to support speculative commercial development, all of the Mozilla drama makes sense.
Remember when Mozilla did a bunch of stupid things and the Firefox fork was an attempt to purge the idiocy? Firefox became popular enough that Mozilla was forced to replace their blunders with Firefox. When the bleeding stopped, the idiocy returned, making a mess of Firefox. Is there a sane fork Mozilla can run to this time?
Meanwhile, who is benefiting from all of the off mission speculative failures at Mozilla? Some other commercial concern? Who is making all of the speculative failure decisions? Someone trying to pad a resume?
I suspect they are losing market share because they are chasing Google Chrome and abandoning the traditional browser market.
They are no longer a fast, flexible web browser.
Dropping support for their long-time plugins is bad move, IMHO.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Thanks for the feedback. I can easily concede that anyone who did not watch "Thunderbirds" on TV as a kid would find confusing any references to stuff like "International Rescue" or "Thunderbirds are Go": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
In any case, this is what it starts out saying after providing a contextual quote: "To deal with Thunderbird's technical debt (which Andrew Sutherland described on the Mozilla Governance thread that Mitchell Baker started), I propose Mozilla fund a "skunkworks" team of about seven people for a year to create a new server version of Thunderbird (called "Thunderbird Server", or "ThunderbirdS" for short) that runs initially as a locally-installed Node.js app providing a single-page JavaScript/TypeScript/Mithril/D3 webapp for email handling and other peer-to-peer communications using the local file system. Thunderbird Server would use Firefox (desktop or mobile) as its primary client; Firefox would access Thunderbird Server just like any other (local) web server using web standards. The most significant Thunderbird Desktop plugins (based on downloads or other metrics) would be ported by the team to this new Thunderbird Server platform (ideally, aided by a custom tool for such porting). Some of the most popular plugins might be unneeded though for Thunderbird Server given they could run directly in Firefox (like translation tools and ad blockers). This Thunderbird Server platform would, through plugins, eventually become a social semantic desktop that could change the nature of the web as we know it, reducing the significance of the distinction between local copies shared with peers and centralized content shared with clients."
Lunacy maybe. :-) But hopefully less loony than what Mozilla is doing now like morphing into an IoT software vendor.
Insulting? Well, "technical debt" was (accurate) phrasing originally from a core Thunderbird maintainer...
Anyway, I'm now too busy and with other commitments to do it now myself. Mozilla missed their chance with me (for whatever reason). But, I still hope Mozilla still goes back to supporting messaging like Thunderbird (and conceptual successors like Matrix.org). There are thousands of good programmers out there who could do a wonderful job making great messaging tools. And many are already (like with Matrix.org, Mattermost, Kolab and more) -- including dozens still valiantly maintaining Thunderbird desktop in the face of constant upstream breakages in Firefox (as Thunderbird includes an entire copy of Firefox in it -- very problematical given Mozilla's plans to abandon Gecko maintenance and move to an entirely new rendering engine called Servo). It would be great if they all got more support though -- or if everyone got a basic income. :-)
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Oh, I understood it after I read it, clicked some links, and did some searching. It's that they didn't (likely) understand it or even bother trying to. Reread what you just wrote. It's terribly confusing to anyone who hasn't read your page.
This doesn't mean your idea is bad, just the presentation. Sometimes it is hard to say things clearly and it is even harder for the more complicated things.
We, as a group, aren't really that good at explaining things at times. We seem to think on a different level and expect others to keep up. I've noticed this and adapted to it over the years.
If you want to be understood then you have to speak at the level of the listening party.
If you don't want to be understood then what's the point of speaking at all?
Seriously, try giving the friend-reading thing a try. I used to do that often and eventually it became easier. Sometimes I still speak above a certain level. If that is the case, it is probably because I overestimated the listener/reader or because I was not speaking to them and they just happened to hear/read. We geeks aren't very good at communicating with non-geeks.
> Remember when Mozilla did a bunch of stupid things and the Firefox fork was an attempt to purge
> the idiocy? Firefox became popular enough that Mozilla was forced to replace their blunders with Firefox.
I remember doing manual builds of Mozilla 0.9.x. IANAP (I Am Not A Programmer) and I had to blindly follow instructions. The original Mozilla was an all-in-one webbrowser-cum-webpage-composer-cum-email-client. The Phoenix project (which changed its name to Firebird and then Firefox, beacuse of IP issues) basically took the Mozilla codebase, and only built the webbrowser portion. The result was a lean/mean webbrowser.
Then they got into "featuritis"...
* spell-check... another feature that pulls in multiple library dependancies on linux, bloats the program, and eats more ram. Why? At the very least, they could've made it an option instead of hard-coding it in.
* SQLite... why? grep (and yes, there are Windows/Mac/whatever equivalants) is faster unless you have a few million bookmarks. SQLite is a database. To guarantee that stuff gets written, it locks things, and Firefox comes to a screeching halt for a second or 2 or more, depending on your machine's cpu speed and RAM. That's just the way database engines work, so I'm not ranting against the SQLite devs. I'm ranting against the Firefox devs who chose to use an 18-wheeler-semi-tractor-trailer where a 1/2-ton-pickup would be sufficient.
* Abortion^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Awesome Bar. With FF2.x, I could type in "sla" in the URLbar, and "http://www.slashdot.org" was the default suggestion. In FF3, I'd get "http://bad.example.com/ifduifusla" which "matched". Yes, after 3 weeks it was "trained" to give "http://www.slashdot.org" somehere in the top 6 results, but for the better part of a month, it was painful to use.
* The Atrocious^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Australis interface was what finally drove me away. Yes, a desktop PC GUI on a smartphone or tablet sucks; I get it. But a smartphone/tablet GUI on my desktop PC sucks just as badly. The final straw was the decision to get rid of text on the menu (e.g. "File Edit View...") and replace it with heiroglyphics. And the much-vaunted "simpler customization" is so simple that it can't restore the the text items. A Google search turned up a gazillion hits on "Classic Theme Restorer Add-on". 'nuff said.
> When the bleeding stopped, the idiocy returned, making a
> mess of Firefox. Is there a sane fork Mozilla can run to this time?
Is there a sane fork Mozilla can *RUIN* to this time?
FTFY
After some looking around, I've settled on Pale Moon. It brings back memories of Firefox, back when it was still a great browser.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
And Mozilla is officially a hate group now. You can say what you want about Pale Moon, but stealing money and code? Mozilla, seriously? https://twitter.com/EmpireConw... http://forum.palemoon.org/view...
in Firefox 53 due out in a couple of months where they will take out bookmarks because nobody has touched the code in a couple of weeks.
Mozilla should reinvent the browser again. Browser is what makes Mozilla. If they don't clean it up it wont be successful anywhere else. If they make it work it will span into other areas like IoT, mobile phones, cars... naturally by people willing to use it for their projects.
Trying to push broken/sluggish/buggy software beast into those areas using heavy investments of resources that Mozilla needs elsewhere is management's misstep.
I am the user of this browser since Phoenix 0.5 (not to mention Netscape before). But it is lately that I started slow migration to Chrome. It all started with inability to use debug tools properly (not working, misleading debugger, extremely slow responses) then terrible video performance on Youtube and crashes and UI freezes... The only reason I use FF on Android is because it supports extensions.
It is sad to hear something like this from myself - me, die-hard Firefox fan.
Well, I've got to get back to work. When I stop rowing, the slave ship just goes in circles.
AC, thanks for the additional feedback. That web page was not exactly what I sent Mozilla directly when I applied there (which was about a page or so long), although I said much the same thing as the summary, and as I put a link to it on the tb-planning list someone at Mozilla might have seen it. I could speculate they rejected my application so quickly (the next day) because they had rejected my previous application a couple years before about Thunderbird and probably just consulted a flag somewhere, but I'll probably never know.
That web page itself grew as I pasted additional emails I sent and various notes on the idea and progress at the bottom. I'd agree it is not a great web page and I should present the idea better. :-) And in fact, the whole project is about better peer-to-peer-ish tools to make sense of complex things and incrementally improve shared workspaces. But, so little time, so much to do, and now necessity and chance has me focusing on other things.
You're right to suggest speaking to the appropriate level of understanding of the audience. Of course, one might expect when corresponding with a place like Mozilla it would be technical people talking to technical people. :-) But, as much as Mozilla is no doubt full of very technical people doing great stuff, as the article and various posters point out, apparently there is a significant disconnect between the Mozilla staff and the Mozilla leadership and the organizational direction (especially now that Brendan Eich is gone).
Anyway, again, sincere thanks for taking the time to respond to my messages and for providing well-meant useful advice to always keep in mind. :-)
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I love the awsome bar and to my workflow it's just indispensable. I can just type anything and it finds it withing my history.
As my job requires me to share URL's quite often (I do a lot of support) the awsome bar works faster and more accurately than Google as it only shows the stuff I care about (places I've been).
The memory/performance does bother me and I tried to migrate to Chrome which felt much faster. But once I reached my typical Firefox usage with 60+ tabs it slowed down to a speed that made it indistinguishable from Firefox (yes I know I'm a slob that should close a tab every now and again).
The thing that bothers me most though is the security aspect, FF doesn't seem to keep up with the security level of Chrome and that is a real concern.
While there might be a disconnect between Mozilla staff and Mozilla leadership, I think the much bigger disconnect is between Mozilla users (us) and Mozilla staff/leaders. While I am not that versed with all Mozilla projects, Thunderbird was the last one that worked well and suited the needs without being burdened by useless features and the nth UI redesign when UI is the least of the problems. I engaged once with Mozilla to volunteer services and provide feedback and they went out of their way to ridicule and attack. If the Mozillas would put as much effort into coding as they do into alienating users we all would be in a much better place. As far as Thunderbird is concerned, being able to use the same profile from multiple clients using a plain simple network share would eliminate plenty of problems. It was suggested years ago and shut down immediately.